Now Playing: Where it's At By Beck
Topic: just letting off steam
For today & the past 2 days I worked before that. My co-workers (on our 'team' all 13 of us)Have been on a special call path, they're trying a new voice response setup & so when you call in & 'tell' the machine what you want to do it then sends you to me so I can ask you again what you're calling for & track it on a computer form & resolve your problem- if I'm able, I don't speak spanish after all!. This makes for aggravated people, a lot of people who don't speak english or follow instructions well & a LOT of billing calls. On my average day as a 'normal' advanced tech agent I take 55+ calls & maybe have 1 call where they ask for my supervisor in a week or 2, I & everyone on my team is getting 4 or 5 calls a day where they want our supervisor. It's telling on everyone & I for one, would much rather explain how to wire 10 decoder boxes than explain why we're charging what we're charging for 'that crap you call programing' which is what I hear all day now. The original rumor was that we'd be doing this for 2 weeks, my Boss told me yesterday late in the day - when I went to get him for my 5th escalated call of the day- that it's looking like monday may be the last day- The plus side of this is that we're waiting aprox. 5 minutes between calls most of the time & sometimes a lot longer than that.
Stupidest thing I heard today: Me: ok, press the menu button on the remote, do you see the main menu?
C:yeah
Me: now press 6, 1 & 5.
C: my tv's not interactive yet. I guess I can't do this.
Me: no, sir, on the remote, use the remote.
(he thought I meant on the tv screen, not on the remote. now most people use the number pad on their remote daily to enter channel numbers don't they?)
The other striking thing, which I had forgotten since most of my callers normally have been transferred to me by someone who couldn't help them, is how little respect people have for you when they think you might just be the operator & will need to direct their call to someone else. I had a couple people assert that I must be lying to them about my credentials & say essentially, that because I answered the phone I couldn't possibly know enough to help them.
One of my co-workers put this whole (ugly) experience in this context: On one hand it's nice that the company thinks so much of us that they assume we can handle anything callers throw at us. On annother it's upsetting to think they had to pull level 2 & 3 agents off their normal splits to take these calls because we're the only ones they can be sure can handle getting every possible kind of call under the sun & filling out a computer form on every single call without taking 3 calls an hour!
The whole thing takes me back, my first year & 1/2 there I took calls like this all the time, just whatever was thrown at me. since then we got away from the all purpose agent (the people who handle billing all the time were terrible at tech- though those of us who learned tech first don't have all that much trouble with billing- go figure!)
ok, that's enough diatribe about my boring Job! I should know better than to write on work days!
